Push Forward Festival – Poetry Night

Poetry at Push Forward Festival at The New Theatre

Dates: Saturday December 3rd from 8pm. Tickets €8

Join us for an evening of poetry from some of Ireland’s leading poets as part of the Push Forward Festival. Featuring The Poet Geoff, Hazel Hogan, Emmett Kirwan, HK Ní Shioradáin, and Samuel Yakura.

Geoff Finan was the Writer in Residence for Dublin City Council for the Dublin North West area in the summer of 2018 and again in 2019 and is currently lecturing in poetry in the National College of Art and Design on and also in Maynooth University.

In 2019 he had the honour of writing the 100 year commemorative poem celebrating the first Dáil in Ireland, titled ‘January 1919’. He recently debuted his first play with The Can Collective called Wakespace during the Scene & Heard Theatre Festival in 2022.

Geoff was commissioned as part of the First Fortnight Festival to write the poem ‘Gloke’ after working with The Travelling Community for 4 months. Geoff has also been commissioned by the DCC’s Culture Connects project to write for the Local Heroes initiative and his poem A Letter To Leo was chosen as the flagship piece for the My Name Is campaign, fighting against child homelessness in Ireland.

Geoff has written and performed a poem for the documentary Baristas, which has gone to number 1 in 8 countries, top 10 in the US and top 5 in Canada and the UK, in the documentary charts and is now streaming on Amazon Prime. He was also recently shortlisted for writing and performing in the short film ‘Taboo’.

Geoff been featured on RTÉ, TV3, Today Fm, 98 FM, FM104 and Newstalk and in The Sunday Business Post, The Times, The Irish Times and The New York Times

Hazel Hogan is a poet from Dublin. Her poem ‘Grangegorman’ was on the recommended list to be studied as part of the Junior Cert syllabus.

Her poetry was submitted into the Irish Poetry Reading Archive as part of the UCD digital library, and she was selected to take part in the part in the Dublin City of Literature project, Dublin: A Year In Words. She has been published on RTÉ and The Irish Times.

She has been awarded the Creative Arts Scholarship and Residency at the Tara Building. She has given many workshops to children and adults across schools and communities in Dublin.

Emmet Kirwan is an award winning actor, playwright and poet from Tallaght in Dublin. He studied at the Samuel Beckett Centre Trinity College Dublin. As a writer Emmet’s play Dublin Oldschool won the Stewart Parker Major trust award, it has played seven sell out runs in Project Arts Centre Dublin, toured internationally including a sell out run in The National Theatre in London’s West End and Emmet also wrote the four poetry sections of This is Pop Baby’s RIOT, which has played Vicar Street in Dublin and toured internationally to The Sydney theatre festival and Skirball New York.

His poem Heartbreak is taken from this show and was adapted into a short film that been viewed over 2 million times on Facebook and Youtube combined and won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Short Film. Other writing includes Wild West a radio drama for BBC radio 4, which has been nominated for best radio drama award 2019 from the writers guild of Ireland. The short play Queen of The Pyramids for Landmark Productions and Cork Midsummer festival’s ‘Theatre for One’ (2019.) He was commissioned by The Gate Theatre Dublin for their Late at The Gate initiative to respond to John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger. For this he wrote and performed two new spoken word poems I love you woman & Mam and Dad are worried.

He is also known for writing and starring in the RTE 2 comedy series Sarah and Steve for Accomplice Television. As well as writing the short films Escape plans for Calipo Films and Outside for Still films. 

Most recently Emmet’s play Straight To Video with Landmark Productions premiered at the Project Arts Centre to great acclaim in 2021. His most recent play Accents, in collaboration with Cork musician Talos ran at Dublin Fringe 2022. His debut novel will be published by Harper Collins in 2023.

HK Ní Shioradáin is a bilingual poet, writing in Irish and English. They were selected for Céadlínte Éigse Éireann/Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022. They won the Márie Mac an tSaoi Award for their poetry. They were a recipient of the Irish Language Course Bursary at the Irish Writer Centre 2022. 

Their poetry deals with themes of queerness and disability through a humourous lens. Their poetic voice stems from years of writing lyrics and is written to be heard and performed. 

They received funding from Creative Ireland’s Incubation Award and support from Axis Ballymun to create a spoken word theatre piece on neurodiversity in Ireland. This project involves collecting experiences from the neurodiverse community and devising a piece based on these experiences.

Samuel Yakura is a Nigerian Born Writer, Poet and Performing Artist residing in Ireland. He’s a multiple-time Slam Champion both in Nigeria and Ireland, winning Slam competitions like ALS, OxFam, and Talkatives. He’s a member with the Wearegriot Poetry Collective based in Dublin. He has done commissioned works for the likes of Summer in the city, Poetry Ireland, Dublin Fringe, Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation, IMMA, Gaisce Awards, amongst others. His works reflect heavily on observing the human condition, their relationship and interaction with society and culture. He is currently in the works with the WeareGriot collective putting together their new Poetry Play “DEITIES” His most recent project is a Poetry Play he is writing and directing themed “Migrating into each other”